Let’s assume that in 10 years, AI has advanced absurdly, insanely fast, and is now capable of doing everything a Senior SWE can do. It can program in 15 different languages, 95% accuracy with almost no mistakes, can create entire applications in minutes, and no more engineers or SWEs are needed… What will all the devs do? Do they just become homeless? Transition to medical field, nursing? Become tradespeople like plumbers, HVAC?
Coding is just a part of the overall “programming” problem. Most problematic areas are in translating what the customer wants into code (requirements analysis), modifying code to overcome specific constraints, integration, etc and etc
This thread is full of people comparing OPs hypothetical about 10 years from now with last year’s capability.
Will AI progress that fast? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It probably won’t get that good, but it doesn’t matter. If it gets as good as your average junior that’s going to mean something like 100% increase in productivity, which means 50% as many jobs and that’s going to be a BIG FUCKING DEAL.
Especially when it’s going to be replacing a lot of other types of office workers. What kind of job is your average software dev going to transition to? Tech support? Not anymore. UI Designer? LOL. Manager? And who are you going to be managing?
If the US doesn’t hit 15-20% unemployment in the next 10 years I’ll eat my hat. I’ll be eating it either way because I’ll be starving to death.
There is a hard limitation on LLM, it doesn’t and by definition can not have a criteria for truth, and unless something completely new emerges, it will never replace a junior, really. Some managers can be convinced that it did, but that will be a lie and the company that believes it will suffer.
It can transform some junior jobs for sure, some people might need to relearn some practices, there will probably be some shift in some methods, but unless something fundamentally new will appear, there is no way LLM will meaningfully replace meaningful amount of people
As a dev, there’s still quite a bit ai can’t do and will most likely not be able to do.
AI is good at solving old problems but it’s not trained on anything new. Its good at boilerplate and templates, but not good at original material. If it gets tremendously better, and really does get to the point where it’s better than we are at development, then the industry will shift into prompt engineering. But I can see a huge reduction of jobs.
If it is able to replace software devs, it’s probably able to replace 95% of the jobs that require mainly using your brain.
Yeah it’s being applied to software devs right now but it’s already capable of replacing nearly every manager/supervisor in existence.
It can make schedules, direct tasks based on inventory, and balance a budget. Have a human backup available on call to fix hallucinations and you’re golden.
You have to understand what software can do, how to design it, and how it should interact with other systems in order to write software and not just code, and AI can’t do that. If you tell it to make you A, and what you really want is B, you’ll never get what you want.
Only about 10-20 percent of my job as a software engineer is writing code. AI can be really amazing at writing code, but unless it can do the other 80-90% of my job without me, I’ll be safe.
Now, whether middle and upper management will know this is an entirely different question. A lot of them think that lines of code written is a good measure of productivity, when in fact it’s often the opposite.
I foresee there being a big struggle for management to come to grips with the fact that AI is better suited at their job than ours.
My best days as a software dev are negative line days.
Hear, hear!
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Why would devs be displaced by an interactive search engine?
They’re just gonna sit around and wait a few months until they are begged to come back and can demand more compensation. The current generative AI, which is not general AI, will not be able to replace high functioning jobs. Eventually, a lot of those software engineers will be asked back and get much more for their services.
You seem like someone who hasn’t really worked in software development.
Software engineering does not simply mean coding. A production grade software application goes through analysis, design, implementation (where coding happens), testing (several phases), release and maintenance. Not to mention infrastructure concerns (storage, databases, microservices, service orchestration, middleware, etc). The whole process is too nuanced and complex to conclude that AI would make the whole career obsolete. It might shake up some areas of software engineering but only a small part of it.
You’ll still need people to verify that the AI generated application actually behaves as per the business logic, runs optimally with the hardware you have and scales as your business grows. Which means engineers for testing and reviewing the generated code plus engineers to setup the infrastructure where the application will run.
The plan is to rehire them back temporarily to babysit the AI and fix all the AI generated crap. Then realize it was cheaper to actually just have the devs make code. Then hire them back at a reduced rate on a more permanent basis with the understanding that they believe the code will still be partially generated by AI and cleaned up by the same people and they aren’t paying top tier for third hand AI slop.
They’ve been doing the same thing in IT for decades, just replace AI with outsourcing.
Same in a lot of other industries too. This is literally how capitalism functions. This is how they reduce costs when they can’t find any other way.
Except it is often more costly to do this in the long run, so it’s a fiscally stupid move that corporations seem to make over and over again.
I think part of what perpetuates it is, the people making the decisions don’t stay there long term, so they never really face the repercussions.
Some more stable places seem like they may have realized this though and keep things all or mostly in house.
I’ll take what money I have stashed away and buy a nice secluded parcel of property with dummy low taxes away from people.
I’ll grow my own food, hunt, forage, etc.
I’ll do odd jobs to fill in the gaps when needed. anything from tech consulting to roof repairs.
I’ll refuse to use any technology unless a job requires it.
and I’ll wait for the inevitable collapse of technological society because a vulnerability was baked into the AI every company is using and nobody knows how to fix it.
I refuse to be a part of a system that denies me a seat at the table.
Combine harvesters are used to till, plow , sow seed , spray, water, reap and manage farms and most livestock have dedicated automated farming tools like cow milkers, feeders, shearers, etc. How long before no humans needed to hunt or forage or farm? When food is even cheaper to produce( of course the ai overlords and ai royalty ) but will hunger games everyone to get the artificially shortage and scarcity farm for vast amounts of resources to select groups.
Riot.
How’s that working for everyone in the USA? How many “riots” or protests have we done that yield nothing?
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https://stacker.com/business-economy/30-victories-workers-rights-won-organized-labor-over-years
Here’s a half decent starting point.
I was going to learn how to give a really good handjob but the AI robots will probably take over that too.
There are a lot of dumb takes here in the comments
Developer displacement works the same way it does for any other technology
The problem is not that the job is eliminated but that fewer are needed per unit of output
My startup only has 4 engineers because we don’t need 5
This trend will continue until the SV hiring bubble bursts
Even if we stipulate that, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal. The software field continues to grow like crazy and we can never find enough people to hire. If ai gets good enough to take the place of some of that hiring, fantastic!
Honestly people are getting distracted here. Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive thats a huge boost for smaller companies with only handful of developers.
Many companies are only thinking about reducing costs for themselves but at the same time they’re freeing up a lot of talent for new and old competitors.
Here’s some food for thought:
- Open source developers may use A.I to develop better software to close gap between paid alternatives. (Blender, Gimp, Krita, Linux distributions, mastodon, lemmy, pixelfed)
- Many LLM’s can already be ran freely and locally. These will only get better as technology progresses. This can make selling/profiting from A.I services a lot harder
- A.I may be used to block ads or obfuscate (create bunch of fake data) user data that is sold to advertisers.
- Some media sites are already using A.I to write articles. Whats the point when users may just use chatbot to get all the information without ever engaging with the source.
These are just few that come to mind. but the unkowns with this are quite terrifying.
Now lets say A.I makes developers 50% more productive
That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.
Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.
The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful.
This glorified parrot tool of LLMs is one of the coolest we have seen in awhile, but it’s not going to materially fix the awful state of the field of software development.
The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.
AI may mildly improve the delivery timelines of the still very incorrect and over-budget solutions delivered by the average development team.
That’s wildly optimistic. If I recall correctly, early studies are showing the 51% of participants who saw any improvement, reported an average of a 20% improvement.
Yes the value is wildly optimistic to match the expectations driven by all the hype from these companies pushing their LLM services.
Even granting that optimism, since 5% of all software projects are on time and within budget, we may look forward to a whopping leap to 7.5 out of every hundred software projects arriving on time and under budget, in a best case scenario.
The hard truth no one wants to talk about is that the average software development team is awful. The average software development team doesn’t understand how to deliver high quality maintainable solitions on a reasonable timeline.
You’re oversimplifying things here there are a lot more variables that influence success in software projects. The company you work for might have oversold the project, the client might only have vague understanding of what they really want, project management may fail to keep the costs, developers or timeline in check, client or the company you work for might have high employee turnover causing delays as new employees need proper induction to the project, the initial tech stack may become deprecated or obsolete mid-way the project, etc
You’re oversimplifying things here there are a lot
I think… we’re agreeing?
My point is that what is currently possible with AI doesn’t solve any of that.
People in this thread keep discussing growth in programmer productivity as if programmer typing speed and number of languages known are the limiting factors of programmer productivity. They are not. It’s all the other bullshit that makes (the vast majority of) programming projects fail.
My source: I know so many programming languages and I type insanely fast. My team is also productive beyond all reason. These two tidbits are only related in that I tried and failed with the first before succeeding with the second.
That will never happen, or at least with how ai currently works. It’s basically a glorified autocorrect, it uses the same technology underneath.
But presuming it does, yes. We will have to go to another industry, like AI prompting. Coding is a tiny part of professional software development.
Yes, exactly this.
When compilers came along, some people honestly thought it would dumb down programming so much that anyone could do it.
When high level programming languages came along, they rejoiced again - now finally anyone can make software.
When Intellisense meat you no longer had to remember variable names, write your own imports and could guess how most libraries work, the bells rang out once again in celebration.
And now we have AI, it’s cool but really just another step like all those steps before. For me, it’s a replacement for the documentation I never read anyway. I can ask an AI a stupid question rather than bothering a human developer.
These days it’s my job to manage a small team of developers - when I ask them why they wrote a stupid thing that makes no sense, 90% of the time, the answer is that an AI wrote it for them.
Glorified autocorrect… YES! It’s a really good analogy that i will use to temper the expectation of my boss. Also: AI hallucination is just a fancy way to say ’it’s a wrong answer’.
And if it’s going to be full-blown AGI then we’ll become AI psychologists.
